


Travel south crossland

by meeks00



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-17
Updated: 2011-08-17
Packaged: 2017-10-22 17:39:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/240756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meeks00/pseuds/meeks00
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Iraq, Walt goes home, and then he goes to visit Ray. <i>"What'd you have to eat today, Hasser? You look like you just stepped out of a fuckin' WorldAid commercial.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from The Who's "Baba O'Riley."

  
When Walt gets home, he's dressed in his desert fatigues. The air pressure smell from the plane fades away, and when it passes he gets a whiff of an amalgam of scents, from fresh coffee and fried food to perfume and sun sweat.

It's hot because it's June. He wrapped up all of his shit at Camp Pendleton, stayed a while longer to hang out at Mike Wynn's for the LT's paddle party, went around the guys' places up and down the West Coast because who knows when he'll be back that way again from Taylorstown, Virginia.

Now he's back home, and he feels like nothing's impending--no new war, no new cities to invade along the way, no new boisterous vocal debates raging below by his legs as he stands steady in the turret of Two-One's humvee.

Here it's moving forward without orders, without a team to cover his six, without a fucking objective to keep his mind occupied. Here it's silent with a rush of different sounds, cold without the warmth of hot sand and the glaring sun and the heat of adrenaline.

He resists the urge to crouch or walk just alongside the walls in the midst of this crowd, because it's weird standing among so many people. They look so normal in their civvies, relaxed and constantly at ease, unprepared for the eventuality of violence. Girls in their hot Daisy Duke shorts and tank tops, guys in flip flops and T-shirts decorated with brand names like advertisements. His own tee beneath his blouse says USMC, and it's a brand of his own that he feels means more to him in what he's done than in what it looks like across his chest.

Some people, though, seem to run their eyes past him and then do double-takes as if they're making sure he's really there--it could be that his camo gear makes him seem like he's in the wrong setting; it could be that he looks as alien as he feels.

While he waits for his bags to circle around to him in the luggage claim area, he helps an old man grab a suitcase twice his size and gets a mock salute and a clap on the back for his "good deeds." He then looks down to his three where a little girl with wide brown eyes runs a finger over his trouser leg, tracing the lines of a brown splotch among the beige, and he just smiles when her daddy calls her away.

After he grabs his military-issue duffels from the conveyor belt, he heads in the direction of the exit. People brush past him, sleeves against sleeves, bags against elbows, welcome flowers against fingertips. He's in the midst of a state of anonymity now, walking around with people's eyes drifting past him as if he isn't a prime target or threat. None of them will ever know the danger he could have been to them with a weapon heavy in his hands and his finger straight on the trigger until the moment strikes for a kill shot.

Someone stops him with a light grip around his forearm, and he freezes. A young woman walks around from behind him, pushing back straw-colored hair that shimmers with bits of platinum under the fluorescent lights, and he notices that she has long legs that stretch down and down beneath a short denim skirt.

He wonders if he knows her, and he licks his lips and kind of ducks his head down as he asks because he feels uncomfortable. She smiles brightly back at him, an easy high school picture smile, and then she says he doesn't and that he deserves a real American burger. When she walks away, he follows.

Later he steps into the sunlight just outside of the airport. He brings his hand up to shade his eyes as if he's saluting someone, but there isn't anybody waiting for him.

*****

Walt takes a cab home and lugs both of his duffels out without the driver's help because he's a fucking Recon Marine. Besides, the man looks like he'd break in two under the weight of Walt's things. Walt tips well anyway and returns the driver's salute without a hint of sarcasm before heading into the unlocked house.

He stares at the chipping paint along the side of the doorway and at the cracks in the frame, thinks about humvee maintenance and jammed Mark-19s and how this will be no sweat to fix. The house is clean, orderly, one-story high, and it smells like apple spice. It looks simple and safe and so foreign for some reason, and he feels naked without his sidearm.

His parents are waiting with some of the neighbors in the living room for a small surprise party. They are holding out a cake with trick candles for him to blow out, and there is a feast waiting for him in the kitchen, but he had that burger at the airport so he doesn't eat anything until later that night. He does, however, extinguish the candles with a blow and an empty wish.

They all look at him carefully, touch him gently as if he might break, as if he hadn't manned the big gun of Two-One's humvee for days straight in Iraq, shooting up motherfuckers like it was cool.

They hug him as if he still might disappear, even though he's made it back in one whole piece, stronger and harder and a little bit disconnected from the things that might hurt him here.

His dad claps him on the back, over and over like Walt's done something great, when all he did was make it home. _My son defended this country,_ his dad says, and Walt just smiles self-consciously. They point out all of the little American flags they've posted all over the house like they're marking territory he's saved, and he thinks of a long rant about how some people don't need moto stickers and country songs to show they're patriotic. It sends a spike of warmth through him past the heavy cold in his gut.

One of the neighbors asks what it was like, gets an elbow nudge in the gut, but Walt licks his lips and tells them it was hot, that you wouldn't believe the wind and sandstorms. He's surprised when his voice takes on an animated tone as he describes Mesopotamian history previously offered to him by the Iceman himself. He's curious at the fact that he sounds so open when he talks about what the Iraqis wore and the words come out so lively when he teaches them some of the Arabic phrases he learned while abroad--because he feels like he's talking from somewhere else, like he's watching himself speak, listening to his own words come out as if from a distance.

What he doesn't tell them about is the feeling of the trigger that is imprinted on his fingers, doesn't mention the scars beneath skin and etched into bones that surface when the faces of the people he's killed come to mind every so often. He doesn't tell them about civilians jumping out of a shot-up car by a roadblock, leaves out the description of a man with a bullet through one eye.

And for some reason he doesn't tell them about the men he fought with, his fellow pioneers in that ancient Garden of Eden--omits descriptions about Ripped Fuel-induced highs and Chef Boyardi ravioli shared in a circle over talk of killing civilians and insults about messed up hicks.

These are the things he keeps for himself.

And when he smiles at the thought, his mom hugs him around the middle and says she's glad he's home too. She says he looks better already. He doesn't explain, and the new worry lines between her brows begin to fade and even out.

He's still in his cammies because everyone bombards him with so many questions that he can't escape upstairs to change, and he knows that being in his fatigues gives his parents a living, breathing trophy to parade around for a while. But he doesn't mind, so he smiles and he answers and he feels like he's on another tour in another type of hot zone, doing a different kind of duty. And this, at least, is something he can find a modicum of comfort in.

*****

Jody visits him the next day from Hollins University. He fucks her against his living room wall while his parents are at work. He finds it isn't as exerting as he remembers, and there is so much skin, and she's so light and soft.

She stares up at him, all careful smiles and gentle touches and big green eyes. Her long, wavy brown hair sticks to her sweaty forehead, to her bare shoulders and collar, and he buries his head in the crook of her neck in an attempt to catch a bit of warmth.

She smells like the perfume from her letters.

Afterward, he pulls her legs from around his waist so she drops lightly back to the hardwood floor. He zips up his jeans as she tugs on her panties and pulls her dress down over her thighs, and then he goes to sit down on the couch and turn on the TV.

He can feel her watching him, as if he's locked under an IR scope, but he doesn't know what to tell her, doesn't know what she wants him to do for her, because he's not really sure that what he's doing around here is any good for himself either.

For a while they watch shows flit by every half hour, listen to characters' tones climb and descend as the action waxes and wanes, and Walt sits stiff in the odd silence of foreign voices washing over him as the sun's light fades through the fibers of his mother's prune-colored curtains.

At one point, Jody reaches out a hand to hold his. It's small and frail, and it makes his insides itch when he holds it because he's worried he might break it, so he lets it go. He pats it in a conciliatory gesture, but he knows it's not enough.

When she stands up to leave, she presses a kiss to his forehead and says goodbye, and it doesn't just sound like goodnight. He nods at her and tries to smile, and all he can think as he watches her go is that he's so fucking cold.

*****

Later that night, Walt gets an e-mail saying, "The fuck are you up to now that you're not shooting up motherfuckers like it's cool? Bet you have more than enough lube now for your gun. _Wink._ "

Fucking messed up hick, Walt thinks, shaking his head as he types up a response.

The next day he's on a plane to visit Ray.

*****

When Walt steps out of his gate, he's wearing faded jeans and his threadbare USMC shirt. He tugs on the front of the shirt, which sticks to the beads of sweat forming on his chest because it's so damn hot and humid here.

Then Ray's there holding up a poster with Walt's name scribbled on it in what looks like a five year old's handwriting. He particularly admires the strategic placement of the Disney princess stickers.

Walt smiles and thinks it's odd how much warmer it is here in Missouri than in Virginia, though he knows the temperature variance is only something around three degrees.

"Walt! Walt!" Ray calls out, waving that poster around above his head as if he doesn't know Walt can see him. Some people are staring, but Walt doesn't care. He adjusts the strap of his carry-on duffel and heads toward Ray, who trades the poster for the bag as if he suddenly learned manners when he came home.

"Welcome to the true South," Ray says with a proud line in his shoulders. Walt starts to fold the poster up, but then Ray bumps him with the duffel. "Don't you dare throw away my masterpiece. Do you know how long I spent writing that shit up so it came out legible? How long it took me to choose just the right stickers to decorate with?"

"I was just going to stuff it into my bag so it can go in my scrapbook at home," Walt tells him, expression deadpanned and delivery sincere.

Ray blinks at him, and when Walt grins, Ray laughs and shoves him one more time. "Asshole."

As they head out of the airport, Ray regales him with what he's heard from some of the others--Poke knocked up his wife, again; he mentions how he dumped his girlfriend the other day because he almost fuckin' died in Iraq, so now he's going to live his life swimming in all kinds of strange; he talks about how he's going to show Walt the picture his mom plastered onto the Nevada-Missouri Wal-Mart Wall of Heroes and how he wants to put Walt's picture right next to his. There's a big, huge cheesin' grin after that statement, and it's enough that Walt almost wishes he has a picture of himself to offer.

He doesn't, so he just listens, and he laughs in all the right places with an ease that was lacking a few days prior after cake and TV and sex at home. It feels good, and Ray doesn't look at him like he's odd.

When they reach Ray's car in the small parking lot, Walt just stares at him with a raised brow and a sideways smile because it's a rusty Chevy pick-up. "Are you trying to fill a stereotype, Person?" Walt asks.

Ray looks like he's stifling a grin as he tosses Walt's bag into the cab. Then he walks around and bends over the truck, running a hand over the dusty hood. "Don't listen to him, baby, " he coos. "Hasser doesn't mean it. Just because your gears need more lube than his Mark-19 and your tires go more haywire in the rain than Captain America's nerves under heavy fire does not mean you don't get the job done." He caps his speech with a light peck on the hood that leaves a Ray-Person-shaped kiss in the dust.

Consoling duty complete, Ray winks at Walt and hops into the driver's seat. "You hungry?" he asks once Walt is settled in his own seat and pulling the seatbelt across his chest.

Walt bites down on his bottom lip for a moment, looks at that smudge in the dust that he can still see in front of them through the windshield. He thinks about the question, looks for an answer, feels his stomach curl at the thought of food. "Not really," he replies, shrugging.

Ray watches his face carefully, as if trying to suss out the truth of that statement. "What'd you have to eat today, Hasser? You look like you just stepped out of a fuckin' WorldAid commercial," he says, and Walt can't read his tone.

He thinks about the question again because all of a sudden he does kind of feel like he's one of those kids with a distended belly--possibly starving to death for something he doesn't even fully comprehend he's missing--and he feels like he could really use a humrat right about now.

"Fuck that," Ray says next as he continues to look Walt over. "What have you had to eat in the last few days, homes? Jesus _Christ._ "

Walt starts to feel uncomfortable because all of a sudden he doesn't think he really recognizes who this guy beside him is, acting more like some sort of mother hen than the guy who dry humps his head when he's trying to forget the image of a man with a bullet through one eye.

He looks over at the driver's seat, and the man sitting there is wearing sneakers and a plain olive T-shirt over beige cargo shorts. His hair is a little bit longer, he's filled out a little bit more, and he doesn't seem to be high enough on Ripped Fuel and dip to fill in the emptiness without the background noise of the static of comms and the baritone chorus of a rumbling convoy of humvees.

Then Ray reaches out a hand, squeezes his fingers around Walt's upper arm, his forearm, his knee, and then he brings his hand up to where Walt's neck meets shoulder and rests his hand there, lightly. Ray's hand is large and warm. And Walt thinks maybe he can recognize the RTO again--the sharp eyes and the rough handling, and there's that easy grin.

"Let's grab some chow," Ray says, turning casually back to the steering wheel.

When he pulls his hand away, he leaves Walt a little bit colder for all the warmth that he had started to feel.

In the driver's seat, Ray's all business now, staring straight ahead through the windshield with his hands at ten and two. And then he pulls out those Elvis sunglasses and turns on the radio. It's familiar and comforting. It's not cold and it's not so silent anymore.

Walt leans back against the passenger seat, feeling the knots in his back and shoulders unwind as Ray revs the engine and starts to sing.

  
 **  
[Part Two](http://meeks00.livejournal.com/1940.html)   
**   



	2. Chapter 2

  
Walt doesn’t realize he’s fallen asleep until he gets that itching, rushing feeling washing over him, which means he’s being scoped or flanked or watched. He opens his eyes and is confronted with Ray’s face up close in front of his own, and there’s that big, shit-eating grin again.

With a grunt, Walt puts a hand on Ray’s face and nudges him back. “—the fuck?” he says blearily.

“Home sweet home, homes!” Ray’s smile gets even wider then, and Walt can’t help but laugh for real at the cheesefest he’s brought down on himself. It feels good.

He pushes away from the seat so he can lean over his knees and rub his hands over his face.

“Don’t hate on my apartment. I just moved out of my mom’s place, OK? As in, a couple of days ago. But I just got this kickass new surround sound system installed and a 52-inch that’s gonna blow your mind, and I have, like, a fuckin’ arsenal of video games. My mom might have cried a little bit when I left because I’m her little ray of sunshine”—pause and a big wink—“but I told her, ‘Mom, I’m a big boy now, and I need my big boy space. For big boy things.’” When he raises his brows up and down suggestively, Walt shakes his head and pushes open his door.

As they step out of the car, Ray continues to rattle on. Walt feels the sunlight hit him once he uncurls from his seat, and it bathes his skin with warmth as he tilts his head up to it. The sun is leaning toward the west now, and he wonders how long it took them to get here from the airport. He feels rested for the first time in months, since before his deployment, and his thoughts drift again to the warmth he feels here, which begins to thaw the ice that had started to build inside him since his return from Iraq.

When Walt snaps to, Ray’s not talking anymore, and he’s looking at Walt with an odd expression, just watching him maybe, or wondering what kind of messed up PTSD motherfucker he inadvertently asked to come visit. But it doesn’t make Walt uncomfortable. He wets his lips with a swipe of his tongue. “You going to carry on being the chauffer and grab my pack?” he asks, breaking the silence.

Surprisingly, there is no witty retort. Ray merely shrugs with a small smirk and goes to the cab to grab Walt’s duffel. “Consider yourself lucky, Hasser, that I’m such a stand-up guy,” is all he says.

Walt feels his own lips pull into a grin. “For such a stand-up guy, you seem to have forgotten that you promised me some grub.”

Ray stumbles back, dropping the duffel and putting a hand to his chest as if wounded. Walt ignores the sudden, pathetic stab to his own gut at the image. Maybe he is going all PT-fucking-SD.

“I’m hurt you’d think I’d let you starve, my dear Walt,” Ray says as he straightens the duffel’s sling over his shoulder again. “No need to be hasty. I’m going to whip up the finest meal you’ve ever had in your entire redneck life. It’s gonna put your Momma’s home cookin' to shame.” He winks. “But that’s only because I banged her yesterday, and she, like, gave me all of her recipes as payment or whatever.”

He shrugs modestly like it’s no big deal, and Walt just shakes his head as he follows him into the apartment complex.

“You didn’t think I’d make you scarf down fuckin’ McDonalds or some shitty fast food, did you?” Ray asks then, glancing over his shoulder at him.

Walt shrugs. “This chick bought me a burger at the airport before I took a cab home. Said I deserved a real American burger—got me a combo meal at Burger King. She was hot as hell too.”

Ray’s face pulls into an odd kind of smirk. But when he says, “My baby boy is all grown up!” his voice is all-natural. He holds the door open before overtaking Walt at the stairwell. It’s quiet for a moment until Ray says next, “Did you bang her?”

“I have—had—a girlfriend.”

After another quiet minute, Ray makes a “Hm” sound.

Not sure of what to make of that, Walt adds the next event in that chronology for lack of anything else to say. “I threw it up,” he admits.

Ray jerks to a stop on the step above him and looks at him over his shoulder. “Threw what up? The burger-girl’s pussy? What, you have some sort of allergic reaction or some crazy shit like that?”

Walt makes a disgusted face and shoves at Ray’s back. “No. The burger, fucknuts,” he replies with an incredulous laugh.

He doesn’t know how Ray’s mind jumps all over the place like that, but it kind of makes him feel less self-conscious about how his stomach’s been acting recently.

He goes on, “It sat in my stomach for all of ten minutes before I threw it up. I pushed into the men’s room and ran into a suit, and I remember him kind of jumping back like I was storming the head.” He shrugs. “Hawked the whole damn burger up right there on the ugly blue tiles in front of him. And the fries. Not even fully chewed up it looked like.”

Ray’s still standing there looking down at him with an unreadable expression, holding Walt’s bag like some sort of knight in shining armor wearing fucking Elvis sunglasses.

Walt’s kind of glad he can’t see past the shaded lenses.

“The suit—he just kept staring,” he continues when Ray doesn’t say anything, “like he was just waiting for me to unfuck myself. Or clean it up or something. So I turned and left and caught a cab home. My parents made me a cake.”

When it’s quiet for a moment longer still, Walt shifts uncomfortably, debating whether Ray needs another shove to get moving again, like a wind-up toy or something, but then Ray shakes his head and continues up the steps.

“If you throw up this meal I’m makin’ out of love for you, Hasser, I’m gonna to kick your ass,” Ray says, his raised voice echoing off of the egg-shell latex paint of the stairwell. “I went to the grocery store, right? Had a list and a pen to cross each thing off with and everything. This shit is going to blow your fucking mind. Like, .50-cal exploding a goddamn Hajji building into rubble, blow your mind.”

Walt rolls his eyes at that, but he actually has no doubt about the truth in that statement. “You gonna be my Susie Homemaker?” he says, a sarcastic lilt seeping into his voice.

Ray grins back at him in an unmistakable affirmation as he slips the key into the lock. Walt notices the glittery ‘Rock Star’ keychain but doesn’t say a word.

“I’ve got your whole stay—from today until when-the-fuck-ever—planned out with shit for us to do,” Ray replies. “And I have a fuckin’ menu planned in my head now, because seriously, homes, you look like you’d slip through the cracks of my hardwood floors. Then what would I tell your momma when you don’t come back home?”

Walt just laughs lightly as Ray leads the way into the apartment, and for some reason he’s suddenly wondering at the fact that he bought a one-way ticket and only just realized it now, when Ray’s confirmed the fact that there’s no deadline to his visit.

And then Ray’s telling him to get his ass inside so they can start on dinner, so he jogs in after him.

***

It shouldn’t surprise him that there’s a boombox in the kitchen, but as Ray flits back and forth across the tile floor like the kitchen fairy, Walt finds himself staring at it curiously.

“Is this an antique, Ray?” he asks over his shoulder. “There’s a socket for a cassette tape—no CD drive or anything.”

Ray glances up from where he’s preheating the oven, punching a series of buttons as if he’s typing in a special code to reveal a hidden weapons cache. Considering Ray’s expertise with technology and his spastic and random personality, Walt wouldn’t put it past him.

Ray makes a face when he sees what Walt is leaning over. “It’s from the fuckin’ ’80s, man. That’s called ‘vintage,’ not ‘antique.’ It’s stylish,” he says defensively.

Walt snorts a laugh and pushes the big fat power button. “Like those Elvis sunglasses you’ve been rockin’ since Camp Mathilda?” he retorts.

Static erupts then, and Walt hears a faint sigh before he’s being hip-checked away from the boombox. Ray adjusts the dials until he comes across a pop music station. Then he turns and raises his eyebrows up and down at Walt. “Our favorite music, am I right?” Ray says. “And for your information, those sunglasses are mad hot right now. And they’re fuckin’ Oakleys.”

“For women, probably,” Walt mutters, and he’s hip-checked one more time before Ray wanders back over to the stove.

***

It shouldn’t make Walt jealous when he wanders out to the living room and sees an assortment of photographs of strangers in each frame. Ray is in some of them, a slightly uncomfortable smile on his face in each one as if he doesn’t quite know how to fake it for a camera, but the close proximity he has with these people is something Walt knows isn’t forged.

He particularly wonders at these set out pictures in frames on the couch sidetable and on the foyer table by the door, because almost everything else besides the main furniture seem to still be packed in the unlabeled boxes lining and stacked on each wall.

Ray is singing along with some song about a chick kissing another chick in the kitchen as he finishes up the chicken dish on the stove. Walt was banished a moment earlier—Ray wouldn’t let him help because it was his chance to cook up something utterly fucking delicious that was going to blow Walt’s mind— _fuckin’ Hajji building, remember? Rubble? Blown._

And Walt had tried to pass the time looking around at everything, asking questions, maybe poking a bit of fun at the strange cow oven mitt and the chicken soap dispenser, but he hadn’t meant any harm. He was just curious about these little things about the life of someone he served with that he hadn’t been privy to before. And he maybe did find it a little bit funny that Ray was so ingrained in his backwards hick lifestyle that even his kitchen utensils and accessories reflected the farm life.

He got a physical shove out of the kitchen for that one.

As he looks at these pictures, he wonders which one among the women in them is Ray’s ex. There’s the perky blonde with red lipstick, the stick-thin one with funky clothes he assumes are fashionable.

Walt’s never really understood the line between tacky and what Jody called “chic,” despite how many times she used to laugh at his expense about it. She never really understood it either, to be honest, and he remembers picking out newcomers to Taylorstown by people’s style of dress with her.

He finds it funny now that it’s coming back, his thoughts about how this world works. It used to be that everyone around him all wore the same uniform, and the only way to tell anyone apart was by the color of their skin, by the timbre of their voices, by their varying gaits, by their laughs. Ray’s voice was always the loudest, and when the man speaks from just beside his shoulder, Walt just represses a smile.

“What’re you staring at out here?” Ray asks loudly and suddenly, but Walt still hasn’t lost his sense of situational awareness and heard him coming the moment the pots stopped clanging in the kitchen—still hasn’t lost it enough to have Ray shock him into jumping.

“Trying to figure out which one of these is your girlfriend,” he replies, waving around the picture of what looks to be a group of friends, a photo that is noticeably lacking one Ray Person.

Ray frowns for a minute, as if mourning the fact that he got no shock response, but then he just raises a brow and takes the photo. “Ex-girlfriend,” he corrects casually. “She’s this one.” He taps his thumb over the face of a cute, girl-next-door type of chick. “Deanna.”

She wouldn’t have been the one Walt would have chosen out of the group. She has shoulder-length, dirty blond hair and light brown eyes, is skinny like a runner and looks like she carries around kittens and puppies that get along together in a little basket on sunny days. Walt thinks back to the dirty things Ray always mouthed off about, and for some reason he isn’t surprised that the girl Ray had back home was his best kept secret.

Walt looks over at him and smiles, has a feeling of ‘I got ya,’ and Ray’s brows come together suspiciously. “What’re you staring at me like that for?”

“She looks sweet,” Walt says, taking the picture back and looking at Deanna again. “Why’d you break up with her? Looks like the kind of girl you marry or something.”

Ray snatches the photo back and puts it on the couch’s side table. “Not really. Come on. Dinner’s ready.” Then he walks out of the room and into the living room.

Walt glances once more at the picture, but then he follows Ray out. Ray pushes him into a chair in the small dining room area, disappears into the kitchen and then reappears, brandishing a plate as if he’s showing off an ancient treasure.

“A complete meal _a la Ray_ —with no peanuts,” Ray says with a small smile and raised eyebrows. “’Cause you’re allergic.”

Walt can’t help but smile back, and for the first time in a long time, he’s fucking starving.

*****

It shouldn’t surprise him that Ray’s cooking is so fucking good—after all, Ray never talks about anything but in extremes—and Walt eats until he feels like puking. He sits back with one hand on his stomach and the other still wrapped around a fork, and Ray’s laughing so hard that coke bubbles start coming out of his nose.

“Shit,” Walt says, voice coming out a bit strangled because he’s kind of in pain.

“Did I just blow your mind?” Ray asks, entire face perked up like an excited Labrador puppy as he wipes his face with a table napkin. “Watch it—I told you that if you puke up my home cookin’, I’d kick your ass. And I make good on my promises, Hasser.”

“Fuck,” is all Walt can make himself say. He sets the fork down and tries to breath, but it feels like his stomach is overwhelming his lungs for space in his torso. “It isn’t funny. You could’ve warned me.”

“Sure, and miss out on this moment? Puh-lease.”

Walt shakes his head. “You’ve been holdin’ out on us, Ray.”

“Yeah right. What’d I have to cook with? I tried to make cookies out of fuckin’ peanut butter and coffee cream and sugar during OIF, but then goddamn Hajiis blew it all to shit. Would’ve been fricken awesome, too.”

“I bet.”

Ray picks up their dishes, and Walt has to wrestle them away from him in the kitchen because all of this domesticated Ray person stuff is kind of wigging him out. Ray smirks and says, “That’s right—you’re _my_ Susie Rottencrotch,” and messes up Walt’s hair with one hand before Walt can duck away. Despite his words, he dries while Walt washes.

Afterward, they recover from their meal in front of Ray’s ridiculous 52-inch TV, and Walt feels surrounded by noise and action from the—he has to admit—fucking cool surround sound system. They watch shows flit across the scene, shadows and light jumping around them in the living room as the sun’s light fades and dies away from behind the blinds.

They reminisce about _South Park_ impressions from Iraq, and for some reason Walt finds them funnier now. It’s weird being here, away from everything he knows, not in a ranger grave buried inches deep in a hole surrounded by ancient sand, or in Taylorstown, Virginia, with his family and friends and Jody, but down here in Bumfuck Missouri with Ray.

Walt doesn’t remember when, but along the way he slips to sleep somewhere between the sound of Ray’s laugh and his own.

  
 **  
[Part Three](http://meeks00.livejournal.com/2691.html)   
**   



	3. Chapter 3

When Walt wakes up in the middle of the night, it’s quiet, and it makes him feel like the whole world is fast asleep. It’s such a turnaround from what he’d been so fully immersed in for the past twelve hours that he almost thinks he’s gone deaf. Sprawled out on the length of the couch, Walt notices that he’s warm because of the blanket placed crookedly on top of him, and his shirt is rucked up under his back.

The TV is on mute, scene changes flashing light like he’s in a dance club or in front of an improvised strobe light of some kind, making his movements jerky and spastic-looking.

He crooks his head slightly up and to the side and sees that Ray is lounged horizontally on the lazy boy, his head hanging half off of one armrest and his legs dangling off of the other. In the flickering light of the TV, he looks like a ventriloquist’s broken puppet—strings cut and mouth unattended, silent without someone’s words pouring out like so much unfiltered muck, which Walt’s getting used to sifting through for the important bits. He finds that the more time he spends with Ray, the more _stuff_ he finds important in everything the guy rattles on about.

Groggily, Walt pushes up on one elbow and punches Ray’s knee. With a spastic jerk, Ray startles awake and rubs at his eyes with the knuckles of one fist like a kid, and Walt feels a rush of affection wash over him. It makes him kind of uncomfortable.

“What? What’re you abusing me for?” Ray asks, voice harried in contrast to the composure usually held within it during moments far more dire than this one. Walt watches him struggle back to a normal sitting position, gangly arms and legs trying to reassert themselves.

“Go to bed, Ray,” Walt tells him softly. He reaches over for the remote and turns the TV off.

Ray groans, and Walt can see the faint outline of his body from the almost-full moon’s light seeping through the slats in the blinds in the wake of the TV’s light. He watches Ray roll over so that he fits horizontally again on the lazy boy, and he thinks only Ray could be comfortable sleeping on an armchair like a cat.

“My bed’s brand-spanking new,” Ray says, voice dipping into a tone that sounds like a whine. “Haven’t broken it in yet.”

“Looks like your body’s gonna break instead if you keep sleeping on that thing,” Walt warns. He rolls onto his stomach, rests his chin on top of his hands, and watches as Ray shifts again to try to find a comfortable position.

“What—you want me to let you cry all alone in the dark out here? Shut the fuck up and let me sleep in peace.”

Walt laughs softly, and he’s still grinning when he falls asleep with Ray passed out nearby.

***

Walt wakes up the next morning to find Ray in the same position he was in right before he fell asleep, and he thinks back to late nights in the humvee before he hunkered down into his ranger grave. Usually he and Trombley would switch on the Mark-19, and he still remembers with such clarity what it was like to keep watch for the men around him from up in Two-One’s turret.

Trombley could sleep just about anywhere—in the bouncing and roaring humvee, during the wait until the battalion was Oscar Mike, leaning against the left door of the vehicle with his SAW cradled against his shoulder like a comfort blanket.

Reporter tended to dig the deepest hole he could until he started sucking wind, or he rolled under the humvee and didn’t come out for a few hours.

Brad slept sitting up when they were in the humvee, slept with his face mostly covered with his sleeping bag when he was in his grave. Walt figured the smell of the Iceman’s body wasn’t enough to keep the man from leaving his nose some breathing air—unlike everyone else who kept their faces tipped toward the sky and free from the isolation of a sleeping bag filled with the overwhelming stench of body sweat, dip, infection, and Banana Boat sun screen.

Sometimes when Walt’s just walking around or when he wakes up at night, he gets a sudden whiff of those old smells, and he holds his breath and holds it so tight that his lungs send shooting pains past his ribs and deep into his gut. But he doesn’t let it go because he doesn’t want to take another whiff of those burning, sweating, dying smells again.

When he wakes up this morning, and when he sees Ray in the same position he was in the night before, it takes him back to those days when he was on watch at the turret, glancing down into the humvee or just around it to make sure that all of Two-One was all good.

Ray always slept upright in his seat with his head still tilted toward the radioset clipped to his flak jacket, or rolled flat onto his stomach in his ranger grave because he said it always made his cock feel good when the tanks rolled by.

Walt suspects that it was more due to the fact that sleep makes Ray lose that wired posture he always carries, the one makes made him look as if his bones are going to bounce right out of his skin because there’s always so much energy roiling around in him—as if he felt protected back then wherever he wasn’t awake and watching out for everybody else, trusted enough in the other men covering his six that he could pass out without covering it for himself.

So when Walt wakes up and sees Ray’s expression still lax with sleep, relaxed and soft, he thinks back to those nights and days in the humvee, of keeping watch and feeling secured enough to fall asleep on his own, and he doesn’t smell those burning, sweating, dying smells again.

He rolls off the couch, tiptoes over to his duffel, and carries it over to the bathroom down the hall. He pulls out his toothbrush and uses Ray’s toothpaste because he forgot his. He doesn’t really think Ray will mind; they used to go—what did Ray call it?—“halfsies” on poundcake and and Pop Tarts because fucking MREs never came with both.

Then Walt hears a faint beeping past the door of the bathroom. It takes him a moment to realize it’s his cell phone, which his mom must have packed in his duffel before he took off. He opens the door and pads down the hallway as quietly as he can, hoping Ray’s light sleeping pattern has worn off from either sheer exhaustion or from falling back into civilian life.

“Fuckin’ A!” he hears Ray shout just as he rounds the corner. All he can see are limbs flying from the left, the right, and the top of the armchair, and he’s running toward his duffel as Ray spills from the chair.

The phone continues to go off with that rhythmic “bleep bleep” because he never really got around to getting any sort of ringtone, and as he runs to the phone Ray swipes his legs, and he goes toppling to the hardwood floors.

“Ow, that fuckin’ hurt, motherfucker!” Walt exclaims.

Ray just laughs and climbs over him, reaching out for the phone in the pocket of the duffel. He deftly pulls it out and flips it open with one hand as Walt grapples with the other arm.

“Walt Hasser’s Susie Rottencrotch speaking, how may I help you?” Ray says breathlessly into the receiver, a laugh hanging precariously on every word.

Walt tries reaching for the phone, tries bucking Ray off of him, but all he gets is a sharp elbow into his chest.

“Shit, homes,” Ray hisses, holding one hand over the receiver as Walt makes an “oomph” sound and shoots him an indignant look. “I’m trying to talk to your mom here. Why don’t we try to keep the kinky moves to a minimum?” Then there’s a flash of a triumphant grin as Ray slides off of him.

“Why hello, Mrs. Hasser!” Ray says brightly. “Yes, right here. Your baby boy is just fine. He’s been fed, walked, put to bed at a ripe ol’ time and everything. No worries!”

Walt isn’t sure, but he thinks he hears laughter on the other side. “Ray, give that to me,” he orders, but he can’t seem to suppress his smile even as he tries to peel Ray’s fingers from the phone.

Ray rolls his eyes and sighs, but then he says, “All right, Mrs. Hasser—it was lovely speaking with you, but Walter is stealing the phone back. OK bye!” And Walt finally is able to grapple the phone away.

He doesn’t even try to explain Ray to her, but he isn’t surprised when his mom notes that his friend seems to be such a “lovely boy.”

*****

Later, they drive twenty miles away in the old Chevy pickup so Ray can show him the Nevada-Missouri Wal-Mart Wall of Heroes, as promised. Ray complains the whole way about a crick in his neck, and Walt makes fun of his flexibility in sleep.

When they arrive, they are greeted by an elderly woman with curlers still in her hair. She puts a yellow smiley face sticker on Walt’s chest with a strong pat, and Ray asks for one too. When Ray leads the way to the Wall of Heroes, Walt walks right over to the center where he knows Ray’s picture will be.

“My grandma was dead set on putting my picture up there when I was shipped off to Afghanistan. So my mom took down another kid’s picture so mine would go smack dab in the middle of everybody’s,” Ray explains, and there’s something sheepish in the line of his shoulders as they look at his face smiling back at them from the wall.

It’s a Polaroid photo, and Ray’s smile is relaxed, normal, unlike the ones he’s in at the apartment. He looks younger, scrawnier in his dress blues than in the bulky combat fatigues they wore—even though Walt didn’t think that was possible—but he looks polished and formal in the starched and pressed outfit. It looks as if he was caught unawares, asked to look in the direction of the camera in the midst of laughing at something—maybe a going away party—and it makes Walt reach out a hand beside him and toggle Ray’s head back and forth affectionately.

“Cute,” Walt says, turning to grin at him.

Ray shoves him away and smoothes down his hair, and the line of his smile is for sure sheepish now. “Shut up. She said another lady told her she shouldn’t do that, and then my grandma told that other woman to shut her pie hole.” He glances over at Walt with a crooked grin. “Welcome to my world, Walt.”

Walt laughs and swings an easy arm around the other man’s shoulders. “Wouldn’t be a proper wall without you at the center of attention, now would it?”

Ray lets that arm stay in place, and his smile still has that oddly bashful quality to it. It makes something hot and sharp twist in Walt’s gut as he feels Ray’s warmth creep through his own shirt into his skin, and he’s wondering at the new sensation when someone yells, “Josh!”

Ray quickly ducks out from beneath Walt’s arm and turns to look behind them to where a group is walking toward them. There’s a wave of chilly air that rushes in on that side of his body, which had been warmed from the other man’s body heat, and Walt feels a shiver run up his spine.

“Josh! _Christ,_ man—you’ve been home for how long now and we haven’t hung out?” The guy who speaks is tall with a lean build and light brown hair. He jogs up and pulls off his red baseball cap, thrusting forward a hand that Ray grasps and is pulled into a hug by.

Walt steps further to the side, lets the guy and the others—two girls and another guy—move in. They're all so normal-looking that Walt can’t really differentiate them from each other, like he hasn't been able to do with everyone else he’s seen since coming home.

He watches Ray’s face when the two men pull away from the hug, and Walt is surprised to see that familiar smile that he’s beginning to think is some sort of default expression. He thinks of the different kinds he’s seen—the wild kind of smile when Ray knows he’s crossed the line, the wide sheepish one that surfaces when he’s embarrassed or flattered. Walt thinks of all of the different ones he’s seen before, the ones he can’t quite identify as one thing or another besides with a certain feeling of just… _understanding._

It’s as if he gets a different language that he’s been trying to suss out for months.

So it’s odd seeing Ray again, here in his natural environment among people Walt doesn’t know, when it’s just been them and Brad and Trombley and Reporter, with the other guys in a place no one else here would understand, would get. It’s odd for Walt, putting the knowledge of those smiles and expressions to use in gleaning some meaning of what these other, normal people mean to a man he’d served with.

It’s weird seeing Ray tossing out the kinds of smiles that had been phased out so quickly in Iraq, the ones that didn’t hold particular meaning except for being present as a tentative sort of welcome. Walt had always assumed Ray was an open person, always assumed that all the smiles and all those word-vomit rants and raves were constant and unprejudiced—a public amenity whether people wanted it or not.

And he sees now that maybe some people never even had the opportunity to see all of that. And for the first time, Walt wonders how much Ray changed after being shipped off.

Walt knows he's changed, after all. At home, he’d seen it in the way his parents explained him to the neighbors, the way they touched him—as if he might break, as if he wasn’t the one that could break them so easily. He’d seen it in the way Jody looked at him as he fucked her against the wall of his living room, as if she loved him so much that she could look past what he’d become. As if she loved him so much that it was OK that he’d said goodbye without meaning to the moment he’d left with the knowledge that he would be gone for quite some time.

“Walt!” A hand on his shoulder, and he jumps slightly, quickly snapping to.

Walt realizes he was staring off at a shelf of fifty fucking kinds of printer paper, and he sees that Ray and his friends are staring at him. Ray’s grin is slightly of kilter, one hand resting lightly on Walt’s shoulder as if to ascertain his mental sit-rep—physical or psychological—and Walt feels a blush creep from the back of his neck and spill onto his cheeks. He licks his bottom lip and smiles self-consciously.

“There he is,” Ray says.

“You OK, man?” Ray’s friend asks. They’re staring at them—all of them are. Ray’s watching his face carefully, and Walt takes a step back.

“Hey—how about I meet you back at the car, huh?” he says, and he’s already walking away before he can see another expression on Ray’s face that he doesn’t understand.

Walt leans against the passenger side door when he gets to the car. Rests his hand on the metal turned hot from the sun. Thinks about his mom calling him, checking up on him maybe, wondering why he isn’t at home, probably. Thinks about Jody at Hollins University, maybe freeing herself up for dates again, wonders if he should be hurt, should be jealous, but all he can feel is nothing—indifference. But here he feels intrusive, as if he’s breaking in on something that he shouldn’t.

Ray walks out a few minutes later, hands in his pockets as he walks over to the driver’s side. Walt gets in without a word when the lock clicks back. The ride back is silent, and the air is filled with the things Walt was smothered with at home. He thinks of changes, of his own changes, of Ray’s, of what he’s changing by being here.

Just because he can’t fit well where he used to be doesn’t mean that Ray can’t too.

Ray turns on the radio. He doesn’t sing. Walt starts to wonder why he came here in the first place, almost can’t remember why.

*****

When they get home, Walt walks right to the couch. He bends down and picks up the remote, turns on the TV because it’s so silent and it’s so cold and he wonders what happened to the warmth he’d felt when he’d first arrived. When he turns to see where Ray went, the man’s standing right there.

Ray’s watching his face, and Walt feels time freeze, feels everything freeze, breaks something when he moves forward—two steps, a crack in armor, of the ice building and fucking building into something he's somehow terrified will overrun him. His hands on Ray’s face and lips _right there._ He’s cold and stiff and he’s pulling away too fucking soon.

“Shit,” he says. “ _Shit._ ”

Walt turns away then, doesn’t know what the fuck he’s thinking. He’s all nervous sweats and shivers, with lips tingling and fingers shaking a bit at his sides, and he can’t help himself as he turns back again to watch Ray’s face for any sign of—anything. Like staring through a shattered windshield at something he's perhaps broken for good. Killed so fucking dead that it stares blankly right back at him.

He doesn’t know what he was thinking, if he had been at all. All he ever does is fucking think, and the one time he stops, just freezes all of those thoughts and all of those memories with the rest of him, this is what happens. Fucking hell.

And now all he can think about is no more smiles and no more grins and a loss of something he hadn’t realized he’d had through those months and wanted back and thought he had and most definitely didn’t have any-fucking-more.

And then he’s shoved backwards.

He feels the back of his head connect sharply against the wall, feels a pang in his chest, something wrench in his gut—until he feels the warmth of Ray’s body along his own, feels the heat welling within him coil down low—isn’t sure if the stars he sees are from an on-coming concussion or something better.

He’s consumed with a cold sweat and a searing heat, all lips and groping hands and wet tongues. Shirts off and then it’s all skin, so much skin and not enough and Walt can’t control his breathing despite a million dollars’ worth of training in control and combat readiness.

He isn't used to the flat feel of chest against chest without cushion—doesn't know what to make of it, just knows he needs to get closer, closer.

Ray shoves him back for a second.

“Fuck,” the man mutters in frustration as he fumbles with Walt’s belt. “What the fuck are you wearing this for? Haven’t I fed you enough yet?”

Walt laughs nervously and pushes Ray’s fingers away. He gets those lips again instead, pressed so hard that their teeth mash together, but it’s OK because there’s that wicked tongue, and then his own fingers slip on his belt latch because he can’t really seem to focus right now.

“Jesus fucking _Christ,_ Hasser,” Ray says after a moment, pulling back and looking down at the belt.

Walt notices that his lips are red and a little bit swollen.

“You sister-fucking hick with your hillbilly belt buckles,” Ray laments. Then he puts his hand around said buckle, and Walt is pulled toward the bedroom. When they get there, a breeze is rushing in through the cracked window, pushing the open curtains wider, and outside it is dark and silent. He shivers, but it isn't from the cold.

Ray pushes Walt onto the bed. The backs of Walt’s thighs hit the mattress, and he’s forced into a sitting position as Ray settles on his knees between Walt’s legs. Walt’s heart is racing as Ray’s hands reach for the belt buckle again.

“How about we do this properly?” Ray says, and he’s grinning a kind of grin that Walt hasn’t ever seen before, but it’s one he abso-fucking-lutely _understands_.

*****

Afterward, Walt is fucking spent, limbs slack and heart racing, and he kind of feels like he’s butter. The sky outside has taken on a tint of light blue in place of the pitch black of when they’d first come in, and Walt realizes with some surprise that it’s already tomorrow.

“Ray?” Walt says quietly into the sudden silence. Speaks softly because he isn't sure if the other man is asleep. Ray is spooned behind him, and Walt isn’t sure if he’s surprised that Ray is a cuddler.

He is, however, mildly surprised at the feeling of hard muscle and strong arms around him. It's not something he remembers, something he's familiar with, something that he knows, but it's strong and it's safe and he can live with it.

“Hm?” Ray says, and Walt can feel the sound from Ray's chest against his own back.

“I feel like I’ve been all over your town and then some. What’d you have planned for us once we’d exhausted your schedule of things to do in Nevada, Missouri?” Walt asks, pulling away and rolling over so he can face Ray on his side.

Ray puts on his biggest shit-eating grin and slings an arm across Walt’s torso to pull him closer again. “Well, I just got this brand-spanking new bed—you didn’t think I’d let it go to waste, did you?”

And Walt can’t help but laugh. Ray’s grin slips away into something softer, more natural, and he yawns as he rolls over onto his back and drops his arm over his eyes, his elbow sticking up in the air as he laughs too.

Walt pushes up onto his elbows, looks at slivers of sunlight seeping in through the cracked curtains over Ray’s body. He scoots closer, reaches out tentative fingers to trace the lines of the blue star tattoos on the top of either side of Ray’s chest and the scripted _No Dice_ between them below his collar.

When Ray shivers slightly and uncovers his eyes, Walt pauses in the silence, but then he watches Ray’s face as he replaces the touch of his fingers with his lips and a flick of his tongue. At the same time, he trails his fingers lower and lower, slipping slowly beneath the bed sheet at Ray’s waist, feels the man’s breath stutter a bit in a slight vibration that Walt can feel through his lips, which he presses lightly across Ray’s chest. He grins.

Walt hears a muffled moan, and then Ray is grabbing his free hand and using his legs to flip them over so he’s straddling Walt’s hips. He’s smiling again, a wicked glint in his eyes and his body heat seeping through skin-on-skin contact. Walt feels the length of him along his own body, a leg snaking in between his—Ray’s such a sneaky motherfucker—lips pressing against his neck, tongue to the pulse there, and he shivers.

For a minute, Ray pulls back, looks down at him.

His smile is there, always ever-present, this one crooked and tilted up slightly more on the left, subdued and maybe uncertain. “You OK?” Ray asks finally, pushing up onto his hands above Walt.

Walt puts his hands on his shoulders so Ray doesn’t pull away any further. He tugs him back down and then feels the tremor of Ray’s slight laugh against his own torso—wants to get rid of that uncertainty he reads in the language of Ray’s smiles.

Ray’s eyes run over Walt’s face, making him feel naked and open, and he wonders then if there is something about him that has to be learned, if Ray is trying to make sense of a language or code Walt has inadvertently created. And then Walt sees the uncertainty fall away from Ray’s face as he shifts closer.

“Yeah you are,” Ray says, voice unusually soft. The uncertainty is gone from his expression, caution nowhere to be seen, and he moves closer again to press a kiss to Walt’s lips. It’s soft and light and Walt feels himself unwind. “You’re _fine,_ ” Ray adds, drawing ‘fine’ out on the vowel and running his hand down to give Walt’s ass a squeeze.

Walt can’t help but laugh then, feels so fucking warm, heat pulsing through him even with the cool air coming in through the open window, feels comfortable and unabashed even with the curtains pulled back and Ray lying there right beside him, naked and expression so open and grinning like a maniac.

Ray starts laughing as Walt wrestles them over, settles on top along the length of him.

“Just fine,” Walt replies, leans down to kiss him, and smiles against the line of Ray’s grin.

It’s quiet then, but Walt doesn’t mind because it’s so fucking hot.

  
 _fin_   



End file.
